S Rozan - Absent Friends

And when Eddie Spano starts asking Sally out, Sally won't date him, but she says no in some kind of way that doesn't piss him off. The guys keep an eye on her, but they find out she doesn't need that. Everyone's impressed, but that's Sally, no one's ever pissed off at Sally, not even Eddie Spano. So Sally marries Markie, and they invite everyone to the wedding, including Eddie, and everyone comes.

Sally's happy.

October 31, 2001

Laura was sitting at Harry's desk.

The big soft chair with a pattern like a Persian carpet was where she'd started. But when Laura was in the big chair, Harry was at his desk; that was how it had always been, since she had begun to take space in Harry's life, since she had made space for him in hers. Sitting there, Laura couldn't shake the feeling that Harry was about to walk out of the kitchen, the bedroom, the bathroom, to ruffle her hair, go over and pull up the creaky old desk chair, and sit down to his work. She couldn't concentrate, waiting for Harry.

Her other usual spot was Harry's bed. That was out of the question.

So she sat at Harry's desk, his few files piled neatly on the left side, notebooks on the right. Two pin-sharp pencils rested eraser to eraser against the ridge on Harry's keyboard. More than once, when his syncopated clicking stopped, Laura had looked over to see Harry picking up one of those pencils, bringing it toward the blue monitor screen as though to correct a mistake, a bad thought, in the white copy glowing there. The pencil would hover, Laura never sure if it was threatening the newer technology-behave, because there's still me-or reassuring it-I've got your back. Then he would drop the pencil into the ridge again and go on typing until he hit the next bump in the road.

Laura had always meant to ask Harry how the pencil and the screen felt about each other. Always meant to.

Soon she would have to start going through Harry's files, and the notebooks, and the computer, too, though she wasn't expecting much. Harry threw things out. This was a habit from his early days, the days his Pulitzers came from, three of them lined up on the wall, all a little crooked with vibration and neglect. “That one,” Harry had confided last spring, pointing an accusatory finger at the plaque in the middle, “is for a six-piece team story. Eight reporters. I wrote the fourth piece. It doesn't really count.” Laura had reached out and straightened the one that didn't count and then the others. She didn't think they'd been straightened since.

Those plaques had been won and hung years ago, before Harry had developed an intimate relationship with gin. In the newsroom Laura had seen young reporters lift their eyebrows, shrug as Harry stood at the shredder, feeding it page after page of notes for stories that would be lucky to see the inside of Section Two. She never knew if Harry saw the eyebrow-lifters, or if he cared, until the day her first front-page story ran-below the fold, but it was her first-and he had grabbed her, kissed her, and murmured romantically in her ear, “Now shred your notes.”

Laughing, giddy at her success, she reminded him that that sort of paranoia seemed to be out of fashion at the Tribune. Harry, one arm around her waist, had pointed to one of the eyebrow-lifters hard at work across the room. “That bozo,” he said mildly, speaking as if he and Laura were at the zoo and he knew an interesting fact about a creature, “doesn't shred his notes. That's all right; he'll never write anything worth a subpoena. You, my little oyster, will. Keep the quotes, to protect the Tribune 's ass. Destroy all else.” He looked at her gravely. “The great and powerful Oz has spoken.”

Laura had spent the rest of that afternoon sorting and shredding her notes.

So she was not holding out much hope for Harry's files, his notebooks or computer. But there would be something. Someplace to start: a question between the lines, a name she didn't know, a call Harry had made that had never been returned. To find that starting point was why she had come.

But first, for the hundredth time, she had reread the story that had begun, and now, she thought, ended, everything.

And been stopped, frozen, by the story's final line.

The investigation is continuing.

Continuing. Laura stared at that word, unable to move her astounded eyes from such an outrageous lie. Continuing? Nothing was continuing. Everything now was new. Everything had to start over.

She shoved Harry's chair away from the desk, paced the room with her hands deep in her back pockets. Whenever she was stuck, this was Laura's way, to stride back and forth frowning at the carpet as though whatever word, phrase, fact, she needed were hiding there.

Sit down, Stone, Harry would tell her. You're driving me crazy. Come have a drink.

No, you drink, she used to answer, I'm working.

Harry would shrug and drink. Laura would go on pacing; or she would storm out the door, run down the nine flights to the lobby, and head uptown on Broadway and then, eventually (and it never took long), back again. Sometimes she stopped at Starbucks for mocha cappuccinos, extra whipped cream. Harry would accept his gravely, savor it slowly, and, when finished, go back to his bottle.

And always, somewhere on the sidewalks, like a dropped quarter, Laura would have found the word she needed. Her cappuccino would sit, cooling and untouched, as she returned to work.

Harry's advice to her: Join a gym.

Now Laura stood at the window. Blades of sun glinted off the river's silver. She didn't like the river to be silver, she never had; she couldn't see anything in water this color. She'd been crying again; she was through with that now, her cheeks sticky and dry, but she was stopped, frozen. These had been tears not of grief but of fury. The floodwaters of her rage had astonished her.

The anger, she now saw, had been building all the time she'd been reading, but she hadn't felt it, the way you might not feel the current changing as you drifted downstream until, too late, you heard a new roar and without warning found yourself crashing over the falls.

After she'd read the article, she'd begun to pace, striding the length of Harry's living room, toward the window, spin, away, toward again, back and forth as though she were in a jail cell. As she made a turn, the silence was splintered by a sudden shout: “Goddamn you, Harry!” She stopped, terrified. Then she realized the voice was her own, and that frightened her more.

And then another voice, mild and amused: Me?

Harry. She spun wildly, but of course he wasn't there. He was dead, he was gone. The hell with him, though: she wasn't letting him off that easily.

“Yes, you!” she hissed raggedly. “Why didn't you leave that story alone?”

Why didn't I-? Please, my little minnow.

Strange how she could hear him so clearly but not see him at all. But she didn't have to see him. She knew that tone, and the infuriating half-smile that went with it.

He asked, Was it I who was spouting that bilge about the north star and the noises in the dark?

“It was dangerous!” she shouted. “I didn't know that!”

Would it have mattered?

“Of course it would have!”

Of course it wouldn't have. Except to make it more exciting.

“Exciting?”

But she was pretending she didn't know what he meant, so he pretended he hadn't heard her.

Quietly, standing in his empty living room, she said, “Couldn't you have been careful?”